Senior Data Engineer (AI Data Platform)

Job Description

About You

You are a Senior Data Engineer who thrives on solving hard production problems, not just designing solutions on paper. You have a track record of taking ownership of complex data platforms end to end, diagnosing bottlenecks, refactoring what’s broken, and shipping improvements that hold up under real production load. You’re energized by optimization work: making queries faster, pipelines leaner, and warehouses more efficient, and you can point to the measurable impact of the changes you’ve driven.

You’re comfortable operating independently within an established architecture, partnering with architects and fellow engineers rather than needing to define the roadmap yourself. Above all, you care about outcomes, clean data, reliable pipelines, and systems that perform when it matters.

Note: This is a 6-month temporary opportunity with the possibility of extension.

You Bring to Applaudo the Following Competencies:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or a related field is desired, or equivalent professional experience.
• 5+ years of experience as a Data Engineer, with a demonstrated record of independently building, optimizing, and owning production-scale data platforms.
• Proven experience refactoring live schemas and executing safe, production-grade data migrations.
• Hands-on experience consolidating and deduplicating data within a Medallion Architecture (Bronze, Silver, Gold).
• Strong Snowflake expertise, including query profiling, performance tuning, warehouse sizing, clustering, and cost optimization.
• Solid dbt experience, including model design, incremental models, materializations, and testing.
• Experience developing and refactoring Airflow DAGs and operating pipelines in production.
• Advanced SQL skills with a strong track record of diagnosing and resolving production performance issues.
• Working proficiency in Python for data engineering tasks.
• Experience with Git and CI/CD practices in a production environment.
• Comfortable working with undocumented or evolving pipelines and schemas, and bringing structure to them.
• Strong communication skills, with the ability to clearly explain technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Upper-Intermediate to Advanced English proficiency (B2+/C1) for technical discussions.

Nice to have:

• Snowflake SnowPro certification.
• dbt Analytics Engineering certification.
• Experience with data lineage tools such as Monte Carlo, OpenLineage, or dbt Docs.
• Exposure to BI or semantic layer tools.
• Experience with CDC or streaming data pipelines.
• Experience supporting data platforms behind AI, LLM, or conversational products.

You Will Be Accountable for the Following Responsibilities:

• Refactor existing schemas and tables to remove duplication and improve consistency within the Medallion Architecture.
• Optimize and reorganize Airflow pipelines for reliability and performance.
• Build, maintain, and improve dbt models that power downstream analytics and product features.
• Implement aggregation and pre-computation strategies to improve dashboard and chat response times.
• Profile and tune Snowflake query performance to support a responsive, production-scale platform.
• Improve overall warehouse efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
• Implement data quality testing and validation to catch issues before they reach production.
• Troubleshoot and resolve production data issues, owning fixes through to resolution.
• Take end-to-end ownership of the solutions you deliver, from implementation through production stability.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of experience as a Data Engineer working with production data platforms.
• Strong experience with Snowflake, dbt, Airflow, SQL, and Python.
• Experience implementing Medallion Architecture and optimizing production data pipelines.
• Experience working with Git and CI/CD practices.
• Upper-Intermediate to Advanced English proficiency (B2+/C1).

Additional Information

About Us

We Are Engineered Different.

At Applaudo, talented people design, build, and scale meaningful, AI-powered solutions that create real business impact. As an AI-native organization, we collaborate across design, development, cloud, data, and artificial intelligence to turn ideas into scalable products that transform how companies operate, make decisions, and grow.

We are building a high-performance culture grounded in five values: Empowering Excellence, Collaborative Teamwork, Unsolicited Respect, Consistent Transparency, and Efficient Communication. These define how we work, how we support one another, and how we hold ourselves accountable.

Applaudo is a place for people who want to learn fast, take ownership, and work alongside strong teams they are proud to belong to. Joining us means being part of an organization that is evolving intentionally, investing in modern ways of working, and leading AI-native transformation at scale.